FRANÇOIS-MARIE, the last
born of a weakly and declining mother, was abandoned to the care of a nurse,
who had charge of him in an upper room of the paternal abode. He had at
first but the feeblest breath of life, and the family did not expect to
rear him. Every morning, for several months, the nurse came down-stairs
to tell his mother that the child was dying, and every day the Abbé
de Châteauneuf, godfather of the infant and familiar friend of its
parents, went upstairs to discuss with the nurse some new expedient for
saving its life. So reports the abbé Duvernet, who heard from an
old friend of Voltaire all that he usually told of his earliest days. It
was not till the child had languished the greater part of a year that he
began to mend sufficiently to give his parents hopes of saving him. Gradually
from that time he gained strength, and became at length a healthy and active
child, though never robust.

It fared otherwise with the mother,
who, so far as we know, contributed nothing to the formation of this boy
except the friends whom she attracted to her home and who continued to
frequent it when she was no more. She lingered seven years after his birth,
dying July 13, 1701, aged forty.

His father, a busy, thriving
man, occupied with his office, his clients, and his growing capital, appears
to have concerned himself no more about the boy than busy fathers usually
did about their young children. He must have been a liberal and agreeable
man, if only to keep about him the learned and gifted persons whom his
wife may have originally drawn. But, so far as we know, he taught his son
nothing but the art of thriving, and this he did without intending it.
Such knowledge pervaded the air of the notary's home, and the boy inhaled
it unconsciously. Annuities, reversions, estates, revenues, interest, shares,
bonds, mortgages, all of which the son came to understand and handle better
than any other literary man of any age, were the stuff out of which his
father's business and fortune were made. The old man little thought what
an accomplished notary his younger son was learning to be, when he disturbed
the clerks assiduously copying in the notarial office, and played with
the rolls of parchment. He caught the secret of all that exact and patient
industry, though it disgusted him.

Of his sister we know little
more than that she was his favorite in the small household, as far as a
sister of sixteen might be to a boy of seven. She was married young to
one of the numerous officers of the Chamber of Accounts, and became the
mother of four children, descendants of whom are still living in France,
and have even figured in French politics within living memory. One of her
grandsons, M. d'Hornoi, was a member of the House of Deputies in 1827.
Her children and grandchildren supplied the sole legitimate domestic element
in Voltaire's life, and connected him with his country's social system.
To this boy of seven, left motherless, she could be only the good elder
sister; not always patient with his whims, not capable of directing his
mind, and much absorbed, doubtless, as girls naturally are, with the opening
romance of her own life.

Her brother Armand, who was seventeen
years of age at the death of their mother, had already imbibed at the seminary
of St. Magloire, in Paris, extreme and gloomy views of religion, which
he held through life. He touched Voltaire only to repel him. "My Jansenist
of a brother," he frequently calls Armand, -- a term equivalent to Roman
Catholic Calvinist. Credulous, superstitious, austere, devout, Armand passed
his days, as many worthy people did in that age, and do in this age, in
making virtue odious and repulsive. The contrast which he presents to his
brother is not unusual in religious communities, but is seldom so complete
and striking as in this instance. It recalls to mind that incongruous brother
of John Milton, the long-forgotten Christopher Milton; extreme tory and
High Churchman, partisan most zealous of the three Stuarts, knighted and
raised to the bench by James II. Armand Arouet carried his credulity to
the point of writing a work defending the Convulsionist miracles, which
is said to exist among the Voltaire manuscripts at Petersburgh; and Duvernet
assures us that in 1786 there could still be seen, above the pulpit of
the church in which Voltaire was baptized, a votive offering, placed there
by Armand Arouet in expiation of his brother's unbelief.

This elder brother, then, had
little to do with forming the motherless child, except to make him recoil
with loathing and contempt from whatever savored of the serious and the
elevated.

Among the frequenters of the
Arouet home were three persons who enjoyed the ecclesiastical title of
abbé without possessing other ecclesiastical quality. In old Paris
there were many such, most of them younger sons of noble families, who
had taken nominally a course of theology, in case anything good should
fall in their way which a secular abbé could enjoy, -- a canonicate,
or a portion of the revenues of a veritable abbey. In the olden time, it
seems, the monks were accustomed to place their convent under the protection
of a powerful lord, by electing him their abbé and assigning him
a part of their income. From the chief of a great house to a younger son
of the same was a natural transition; and hence the swarm of abbés,
in semi-clerical garb, more or less endowed with clerical revenue, who
figured in French society of that century, -- gentlemen of leisure, scholars
by profession, and much given as a class to the more decorous audacities
of unbelief. The French are not particular in the matter of titles. In
the course of time any man in France who had a tincture of the ecclesiastic
in him might style himself abbé, -- a word that, after all, only
means father.

The Abbé Rochebrune was
one of these, described by Voltaire himself, in after years, as an agreeable
poet, and still known to collectors as the author of a cantata upon the
story of Orpheus, which was set to music by Clérambault, a noted
composer and organist of Paris. This cantata was performed at court before
Louis XIV., with great applause, at a time when such compositions were
in the highest vogue.

Nicholas Gédoyn, another
of the abbés, was a more important and more interesting person.
Like Rochebrune, he was the scion of an ancient race, a circumstance that
gave him a canonicate and a revenue from two abbeys while he was still
in the prime of manhood. He had a passion for the classic authors of antiquity,
and published free translations of Quintilian and Pausanias, which remained
for two generations popular works in France, and are still read. He was
one of that antique race of scholars who could not go anywhere without
their pocket Horace. He loved his Horace, and wrote a "Conversation" upon
him. The titles of his works show the bent of his mind: "Life of Epaminondas,"
"Roman Urbanity," "The Pleasures of the Table among the Greeks," "Apology
for Translations," "The Ancients and the Moderns," "The Judgments of Photius
upon the Greek Orators." He also wrote a treatise upon the "Education of
Children," that explains in part the warm interest which we know he took
in the education of the little François Arouet, whom he influenced
powerfully and decisively. Jesuit, canon, and abbé as he was, he
was as much pagan as Christian; or, as Voltaire more politely expresses
it, in his list of the authors of Louis XIV.'s time: "The Abbé Gédoyn
was so warmly enamored of the authors of antiquity that he willingly pardoned
their religion in consideration of the beauties of their works and their
mythology." The genial abbé had little love of modern authors. He
thought the human mind had lapsed and narrowed under Christianity, and
that great poetry and great eloquence had passed away with the mythology
of the Greeks. Milton's "Paradise Lost" seemed to him a "barbarous poem,
of a fanaticism dismal and disgusting, in which the Devil howled without
ceasing against the Messiah."

This amiable and enthusiastic
scholar, nourished and limited by the literature of the past, loved the
child, associated familiarly with him all through his forming years, and
breathed into him that love of the ancient models which his works so remarkably
exhibit. Gédoyn, like Rochebrune, was interested in music. He goes
so far as to say that the moderns cannot in the least appreciate the poems
of Pindar because the music is lost to which they were sung.

[There is an error in the original text - an apparent
omission at this point.]

again, for this abbé has a place in the catalogue
of French writers only as the author of a "Treatise upon the Music of the
Ancients." The particular tie which bound these abbés together was
probably their common regard for Ninon de Lenclos, whose father was an
amateur lutist of celebrity and learning, and she was well skilled in the
instruments of the time. They were all members of the elegant and distinguished
circle which gathered round Ninon in her old age, one charm of whose abode
was the excellent music furnished by herself and her guests. The little
Arouet had no ear for music, but he had an ear very susceptible and attentive
to other lessons taught him by his abbés.

Châteauneuf loved the French
classics as much as Gédoyn loved the Greek and Roman; Racine was
his favorite among the French poets, who always remained Voltaire's. "Sixty
years ago," wrote Voltaire in 1766, "the Abbé de Châteauneuf
said to me, 'My child, let the world talk as it will, Racine will gain
every day, and Corneille lose.'"

This last lover of Ninon was
brother to the Marquis de Châteauneuf, a person of note in the diplomacy
of the time, ambassador to Holland and to Turkey at a later day. The abbé
was a gay, decorous, and genial man of the world, known in all agreeable
circles, and, as St. Simon records, "welcome in the best." In particular,
he frequented the opulent and elegant abode of the Abbé de Chaulieu,
poet and epicure, who drew thirty thousand francs a year from the revenues
of country abbeys, which he spent in Paris, entertaining princes, poets,
and literary churchmen. This luxurious ecclesiastic lived near the Arouets,
and his house was the door through which the youngest of them was to make
his way to the elevated social spheres.

But it was the Abbé Châteauneuf
who was the child's first instructor. In his character of godfather, he
had promised to see that the boy was duly instructed in religion, and reared
in accordance with the laws and usages of the Catholic Church. Voltaire
told his intimate friends how his godfather fulfilled this vow. He first
made the child read and repeat the rhymed fables of La Fontaine, -- new
works then, the author having survived till this boy was half a year old.
Duvernet mentions a piece by another hand, which, he says, the boy knew
by heart when he was three years of age, -- "La Moïsade," a fugitive
poem then in great vogue among these gay abbés, who lived upon the
revenues of a church which they despised and undermined.

We need not believe that the
boy knew this piece by heart at three years of age; but it was among the
pieces of verse which he first heard and longest remembered. Such productions,
common as they afterwards were, had in 1697 the combined charm of novelty
and danger. They circulated in manuscript from hand to hand, and from circle
to circle; grave men and famous women copied them into their diaries, where
they may still be read, together with those satires and squibs which caused
the government of the Bourbons to be described as a despotism tempered
by epigrams. This "Moïsade" is a short poem in the deistical taste;
its main purport being that all of religion is a device of interested men,
excepting alone the doctrine of a Supreme Being. Moses, according to this
poet, availed himself of the credulity of the ignorant multitude in order
to secure obedience to good laws. It concludes thus:--

"Men vain and fanatical
receive, without difficulty, the most chimerical fables. A little word
about eternity renders them benign and peaceful; and thus the whole of
a stupefied people are reduced to kiss the ligatures that strangle them.
By such arts Moses knew how to fix the restless spirit of the Hebrews,
and took captive their credulity by ranging his politic laws under the
standard of the Divinity. He pretended to have seen upon a distant mountain
celestial visions. He gave those rustics to understand that God, in his
splendor and majesty, had appeared before his dazzled eyes. Authentic tables
he showed them, containing God's will. He supported by pathetic tones a
tale so well invented, and the entire people was enchanted with those magnificent
fooleries. Cunning falsehood passing for truth established the authority
of that legislator, and gave currency to the politic errors by which the
world was infected."

Such was the lesson taught the
infant Arouet through the instrumentality of his godfather; and probably
the whole Arouet household and circle approved it, except his brother Armand.
Such was the tone of the circle of abbés, poets and placemen who
lived in the neighborhood, and had to do with the formation of. this most
susceptible boy, from his infancy to mature age.

There was such a stir in matters
religious during the ten years spent at his father's house that so eager
and intelligent a boy as he was could not have failed to know something
of it. In writing certain passages, half a century later, of his "Age of
Louis XIV.," he may have drawn upon his own recollections as a little child.
It was about 1702, as he therein records, that a strong feeling arose within
the church itself against the filthy relics with which every altar then
reeked. Readers who have chanced to see the old English ballad of Cromwell's
time, called "A Journey into France," may have supposed that its list of
the relics in Notre Dame of Paris was a mere invention of a "natural enemy."
Besides a sleeve and a slipper of the Virgin Mary, the poet enumerates
among "the sights of Nostre Dame," --

"Her Breasts, her Milk, her very
Gown Which she did weare in Bethlem
town,
When in the Inne she lay; Yet all the world knows
that 's a fable, For so good Cloaths ne'r
lay in stable,
Upon a lock of Hay.

"There is one of the Crosses
Nails, Which whoso sees his bonnet
vailes,
And if he will, may kneel: Some say, 't is false, 't was
never so, Yet, feeling it, thus much I
know,
It is as true as Steel."

This catalogue of disgust was
probably not invented by the poet, for we know that offensive objects,
similarly described, were actually exhibited in the chief church of France
when François-Marie Arouet was a child in his father's house, near
by. It was in 1702, when he was eight years of age, he tells us, that there
arose in France a bishop -- Gaston-Louis de Noailles -- who was brave enough
to take from his metropolitan church, at Chalons on the Marne, a relic
which had been adored for ages as the navel of Jesus Christ. This bishop
had the courage to throw away the monstrous thing.

"All Chalons murmured against
the bishop. Presidents, counselors, placemen, royal treasurers, merchants,
men of note, canons, priests, protested unanimously, in legal form, against
the enterprise of the bishop, demanding the return of the navel, and supporting
their demand by referring to the robe of Jesus Christ preserved at Argenteuil,
his handkerchief at Turin and at Laon, one of the nails of the cross at
St. Denis, and so many other relics which we preserve and despise, and
which do so much wrong to the religion that we revere. But the wise firmness
of the bishop carried the day at last over the
credulity of the people."'

This movement had indeed originated
some years before with Jean de Launoi, a famous and learned doctor of Paris,
who made such effective war against the falsities of the Roman calendar
as to acquire the name of Saint Expeller (Dénicheur de Saints).
He had the mania to scrutinize the historical claims of popular saints,
and, if he found the testimony insufficient, erased them from his list.
"He is terrible alike to heaven and earth," says a writer of that day,
"for he has tumbled more saints out of Paradise than any ten Popes have
put there." A witty priest remarked that whenever Doctor de Launoi came
into his parish he made profound reverences to him, for fear he should
take away his St. Roch. A country magnate begged him not to harm St. Yon,
the patron saint of one of his villages. "How shall I do him any harm,"
said the Dénicheur, "since I have not the honor to know him?" On
another occasion he declared that he did not turn out of heaven the blessed
whom God had placed there, but only those whom ignorance and error had
slipped in. He held "a Monday" at his house for the discussion of saintly
claims and traditions, when he made such havoc of favorite saints, male
and female, and turned into ridicule so many pious and romantic fictions,
that Louis XIV. asked him to discontinue those assemblies. Witty and gay
churchmen laughed at his honest zeal; the king feared it; and so the beginning
of reform within the church could not go far.

All this was "in the air" while
Voltaire was a little boy at his father's house; and during the whole forming
period of his life he lived in the very thick of it. He had also an elder
brother in Paris, who made conscientious living ridiculous and offensive.

CHAPTER V. AT SCHOOL.

THE boy remained at home three
years after his mother's death, with his father, sister, and elder brother,
instructed in a desultory way by the Abbé Châteauneuf. The
family lived liberally and with some elegance, enjoying, as documents attest,
a large garden, a summer residence in a suburban village, with a farm adjacent,
horses, vehicles, books, an ample income, consideration, and a circle of
agreeable friends, whom these alone never command. "I wrote verses from
my cradle," Voltaire remarks more than once, and Duvernet adds that Armand
Arouet also wrote them, even while both were boys at home. The family,
he says, used to amuse themselves by pitting the brothers against one another
in verse-making, and the verses of the younger were so good as at first
to please and afterwards to alarm his father, who was a man of judgment,
and dreaded the development of so unprofitable a talent.

Maître Arouet, like a true
French father, had a scheme of life for each of his sons. The elder, as
a matter of course, would follow his father's business of notary, and succeed
by inheritance to his father's offices. For his younger son he cherished
more ambitious views: he designed to make a solicitor or an advocate of
him. A notary, in such practice as he enjoyed, would be almost a sufficient
patron to a young advocate, and it would be both convenient and advantageous
to have a lawyer in the family. We still hear of solicitors in London,
in large practice, bringing up a son or a nephew as a barrister, because
it is solicitors who choose barristers for their clients. There were also
places open to the legal profession in France, procurable by purchase,
by interest, or by a blending of the two, which led to the higher magistracy,
if not to the court and cabinet of the king.

This father, it is evident,
had set his heart upon seeing his younger son enter a career in which he
could push him on to fortune with advantage to himself; and to this end
he took precisely the course which an opulent father of his rank would
adopt at the present time: he sent him to the great school of the day,
-- the Eton of France, -- the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand, attended
then by two thousand boys of the most distinguished families in the kingdom.
This school, which still exists upon its ancient site in the Rue St. Jacques,
in the heart of old Paris, presented almost every attraction which could
weigh with a fond or an ambitious parent. The Jesuits were in the highest
credit with king, court, and hierarchy, and this school was among their
most cherished and important institutions. Years before, when Louis XIV.
visited it in state to witness a play performed by the pupils, he let fall
an expression which gave it the name it bore, and brought it into the highest
fashion. A spectator said, "Everything is admirable here." The king, hearing
the remark, responded, "Certainly, it is my college." The next morning,
before the dawn of day, the old name of "Collège of Clermont" had
disappeared from the gate-way, and in its stead was placed a new name,
"Collège Louis-le-Grand."

The urbane and scholarly Jesuits
held this king in firm possession. That plain-spoken lady, Madame, mother
of the Regent, tells us in her Memoirs that the priests had made the king
believe all men damned except those whom Jesuits had instructed. If any
one about the court, she adds, wished to ruin a man, he had only to call
him a Huguenot or a Jansenist, and his business was done. Her son, the
Duke of Orleans, desired to take a gentleman into his service who had been
accused of Jansenism. "Why, nephew," said the king, "do you think of such
a thing as receiving a Jansenist into your service?" The prince replied,
"I can positively assure your majesty that he is no Jansenist. It is rather
to be feared that he does not even believe in God." "Oh," said the king,
"if that 's all, and you give me your word he 's no Jansenist, take him."
It is doubtful if Maître Arouet thought better of the Jansenists
than the king, since his son Armand had come from their teaching a narrow
and cheerless devotee.

It was in the autumn of 1704,
a few weeks after the battle of Blenheim, that François-Marie Arouet,
aged ten years, was placed in this famous school. His home was within an
easy walk of the miscellaneous aggregation of buildings belonging to the
college in the Rue St. Jacques, on the southern side of the Seine; but
his father, left a widower three years before, had given away his only
daughter in marriage, and therefore entered his son among the boarders,
five hundred in number.

The child was not turned loose
among this great crowd of boys, to make his way as best he could. There
were privileges which wealth could buy, and Maître Arouet provided
for his son one of the most valuable of these. The price of board and tuition
was four hundred francs a year; which entitled the pupil to no special
care or comfort. A prince, or indeed any man who chose to pay the extra
cost, could establish his son in a private room, and provide him with a
servant and tutor; and there were usually thirty or forty boys in the college
thus favored. The private rooms were in such request that it was necessary
to speak for one of them years before it was wanted. There were thirty
or forty larger rooms for groups of five, six, or seven pupils, each group
under the care of a préfet, a priest, who served them as
father and tutor, aiding them in their lessons, and keeping them from harm.
It was in one of these groups that Maître Arouet placed his child,
under the care of Father Thoulier, a young priest (twenty-two in 1704)
of noted family and attainments. What better could a generous father do
for a promising, motherless boy of ten in the Paris of 1704? Clad in a
scholar's modest frock and cap, brown-haired, bright-eyed, not robust,
already practiced in gay mockery of things revered, François Arouet
took his place in that swarm of French boys of the Collège Louis-le-Grand.
There he remained for seven years, and it was his only school.

We must think of it simply as
a boys' school, not a college; a humming, bustling hive of boys, given
to mischief, and liable to the most primitive punishments when detected
in the same. It was while Voltaire was a pupil that the Duke de Boufflers
and the Marquis d'Argenson conspired with other boys to blow a pop-gun
volley of peas at the nose of the unpopular professor, Father Lejay, and
were condemned to be flogged for the outrage. The marquis, a boy of seventeen,
the son of a king's minister, managed to escape; but the younger duke,
though he was named "Governor of Flanders" and colonel of a regiment, was
obliged to submit to the punishment. Voltaire, too, speaks of his préfet
giving him and his comrades some slaps sur les fesses
by way of amusement." The discipline, however, was far
from being severe, and there was evidently a friendly sympathy between
pupils and teachers, which, in the case of Voltaire, survived school-days.

In no important particular did
this school differ from a Jesuit school of the present moment, such as
we may visit in Rome, Vienna, Montreal, New York. Sixty years after leaving
it, Voltaire recalled to mind the picture, twelve feet square, which adorned
one of its halls, of St. Ignatius and St. Xavier going to heaven in a resplendent
chariot drawn by four white horses, the Father Eternal visible on high,
wearing a beautiful white beard flowing to his waist, the Virgin and her
Son by his side, the Holy Spirit beneath in the form of a dove, and a choir
of angels waiting with joined hands and bowed
heads to receive the illustrious fathers of the order.
He remembered, too, that if any one in France had presumed to ridicule
this childish legend, the reverend Père la Chaise, confessor of
the king, would have had the scoffer in the Bastille with promptitude.
Just such pictures still hang in many a school, and the general view of
the universe intended to be inculcated by them is not materially changed.
But the Bastille is gone, and the power of Père la Chaise is diminished.

The boy took his place in the
lowest class, the sixth, and began his Rosa, la Rose, in the crabbed
old "Rudimenta" of Despautères, written in Latin, and stuffed with
needless difficulties of the good old-fashioned kind. At many schools a
better book was used, written in French, and every way more suitable; but
no Jesuit of that generation would adopt it because it was written by the
Fathers of Port Royal, odious Jansenists! In Greek he was given a little
book of easy sentences, by Jean Stobée, a compiler who lived in
the fourth century; and this was followed, in his second year, by a selection
of Æsop's Fables. Early in the course he was set to reading the Latin
poems of Father Commire, who put into such hexameters as he could command
the stories of Jonah, Daniel, and the Immaculate Conception, for the edification
of youth; also, some pompous eulogies of the Virgin Mary. And so he worked
his way up through all the classes, meeting every day similar incongruities,
at the recollection of which he laughed all his life: Epictetus one hour,
and St. Basil's Homilies the next; now Lucian, now St. Chrysostom; Virgil
in the morning, Commire in the afternoon; Cicero alternating with Father
Lejay's Latin Life of Joseph; Sallust followed by a Psalm of David, in
what he calls "kitchen Latin;" the college course being that wondrous mixture
of the two Romes -- Cicero's Rome and the Pope's Rome, both imperial --
which for ages constituted polite education. The teachers were amiable
and worthy gentlemen, who did the best they knew for their pupils. It merely
happened that they now had a pupil in whom the ingredients would not mix.

The most gifted boy, in the most
favorable circumstances, can only make a fair beginning of education from
ten to seventeen. Voltaire, at the end of his course, could not have entered
such universities as Oxford, Cambridge, Berlin, and Harvard are now. He
may have had Latin enough, but not half enough Greek; no modern language
but his own; scarcely any tincture of mathematics; no modern history; no
science; not even a tolerable outline of geography. The school-books still
held to the ancient theory that rivers were formed by the ocean running
into deep caverns under the mountains; and if any of the fathers had yet
heard of the new astronomy of Professor Isaac Newton (adopted at Oxford
in 1704, Voltaire's first year at school), they had heard of it only to
reject it as heresy. He did not learn the most remarkable events even of
French history, unless he learned them out of class. "I did not," he intimates,
"know that Francis I. was taken prisoner at Pavia, nor where Pavia was;
the very land of my birth was unknown to me. I knew neither the constitution
nor the interests of my country; not a word of mathematics, not a word
of sound philosophy.
I learned
Latin and nonsense."

We have a work upon education
by Jouvency, a Jesuit father of that generation, in which no mention is
made of geography, history, mathematics, or science. Much Latin, little
Greek, and plenty of what Voltaire called nonsense (sottises) made
up the mental diet of the pupils of the Collège Louis-le-Grand.

The main strength of the worthy
fathers was expended in teaching their pupils to use words with effect
and grace. The nonsense (les sottises) was a necessity of their
time and vocation. Grave and learned men could still gravely and learnedly
discourse upon the grades of angels, the precise difference between a "throne"
and a "dominion," the language employed by Adam and Eve, the parents of
Melchisedech, and the spot whence Enoch had been translated to heaven.
Boys could not escape such
sottises; but in a fashionable school
of the learned and courtly Jesuits they were taught with more of formality
and routine than among Jansenist orders, who were rude enough to take such
things seriously.

Literary skill was what this
boy acquired at school, and scarcely any other good thing. He studied and
loved Virgil, his "idol and master." He studied and loved Horace, the model
of much of his maturest verse. He loved to recall, in later years, the
happy hour when, as a school-boy, he came upon that passage of Cicero's
oration on behalf of the poet Archias, which has been a favorite sentence
with school-boys for many a century: "Studies nourish youth, cheer old
age, adorn prosperity, console adversity, delight at home, are no impediment
abroad, remain with us through the night, accompany us when we travel,
and go with us into the country." In a letter to Madame du Châtelet,
written in the first warmth of their affection, he speaks of having often
repeated to her those words, which, he says, he early
adopted as his own. He speaks more than once, in his letters,
of his boyish sensibility to the charms of poetry, -- his first passion
and his last. Hebrew he mentions having tried in vain to learn. In a letter
of 1767, in repudiating the doctrine of the natural equality of minds,
he adduces his own incapacities: "As early as my twelfth year I was aware
of the prodigious number of things for which I had no talent. I knew that
my organism was not formed to go very far in mathematics. I have proved
that [I] have no capacity for music. God has said to each man, Thus far
shalt thou go, and no farther. I had some natural power to acquire modern
languages; none for the Oriental. We
cannot all do all things."

His teachers seemed chosen to
nourish his reigning tastes. Father Thoulier, his tutor, known afterwards
as Abbé d'Olivet was one of the most enthusiastic and accomplished
Latinists in Europe, his translations of Cicero remaining classic to this
day in France. He spent a long life in the study of Roman literature, his
love for which had originally drawn him into the order, against the wishes
of his family. "Read Cicero! Read Cicero!" he exclaimed in a public address;
and these words, as one of his biographers remarks, were the moral of his
life. He could almost have added, "Read nothing but Cicero!" He was a familiar,
genial teacher, whom Voltaire, half a century later, used to address as
"my dear Cicero;" and the abbé would return the compliment by telling
his pupil that be was tired of men, and passed his days "with a Virgil,
a Terence, a Molière, a Voltaire." In his latest years he became
a kind of literary bigot, vaunting his favorite authors and reviling the
favorites of others. He was in the ardor and buoyancy of youth when he
breathed into this susceptible boy the love of Cicero, and gave him familiar
slaps by way of amusement.

But the préfet
only saw him safely to the door of the classrooms. His chief professor
of Latin was Father Porée, whose labor of love was to write Latin
plays for the boys to perform, some of which
are still occasionally
presented in French schools.
M. Pierron declares that he shall not to his dying day forget the "prodigious
ennui" that he endured in reading these productions, characterized,
as he remarks, by inanity of conception, absence of interest, puerility
of style, and
jests in bad taste. They were, however,
sufficient for their purpose, and gave the author a great reputation. He
was a handsome, imposing, fluent, and agreeable man, who knew how to hold
his classes attentive, and to adorn the platform on state occasions. Voltaire
speaks of Father Porée with respect and fondness thirty years after
leaving school, when his old master was at the head of the college.

It was Father Porée who
said of the boy that "he loved to weigh in his little scales the great
interests of Europe;" which calls to mind a remark of his own, written
half a century later: "In my infancy I knew a canon of Péronne,
aged ninety-two, who was reared by one of the most infuriate commoners
of The League. He always said [in speaking of the assassin
of Henry IV.], 'the late Monsieur de Ravaillac.'"
Being at a Jesuit college, he could not fail to hear something, from time
to time, of the wondrous attempts of the Jesuits in Canada, made familiar
to modern readers through the works of Dr. Francis Parkman. He even knew
a M. Brébeuf, grand-nephew of that Father Brébeuf, martyr,
bravest of the brave, whom Dr. Parkman has so nobly delineated in his "Jesuits
in North America." Voltaire heard from M. Brébeuf an anecdote that
may have come from the missionary's lips: "He told me that his grand-uncle,
the Jesuit, having converted a pretty little Canadian boy, the tribe, much
offended, roasted the child, ate him, and gave a choice portion [une
fesse] to the reverend Father Bréeuf, who, to get out of the
scrape, said it was a fast with him that day."

From such slight indications
as these we can infer that, little as the fathers may have formally taught
him of modern history, he was not inattentive to the events of his time,
and gained some knowledge of the heroic ages of France.

A comrade of Porée was
Father Tournemine, an inmate of the Collège Louis-le-Grand, though
not officially connected with it. He conducted a monthly magazine for the
Jesuits, a kind of repository of historical memoirs and pious miscellany.
He was a doting lover of such literature as he liked, a man of the world,
a genial, easy companion to young and old, and held in high esteem in the
college as literary ornament and arbiter. Between this editor and young
Arouet there grew an attachment which lasted many years beyond the college
course of the boy, and influenced both their lives. "While his comrades,"
says Duvernet, "strengthened their constitutions, though thinking only
of amusing themselves, in games, races, and other bodily exercises, Voltaire
withdrew from the playground to go and strengthen his mind in conversation
with Fathers Tournemine and Porée, with whom he passed most of his
leisure; and he was accustomed to say to those who rallied him upon his
indifference to the pleasures natural to his age, 'Every one jumps and
every one amuses himself in his own way.'"

It so chanced that Tournemine
was as strenuous a partisan of Corneille as Abbé Châteauneuf
was of Racine, whom the Jesuits held to be a Jansenist, and therefore neither
poet nor Christian. "In my infancy," says Voltaire, in his edition of Corneille,
"Father Tournemine, a Jesuit, an extreme partisan of Corneille, and an
enemy of Racine, whom he deemed a Jansenist, made me remark this passage
[Agesilaus to Lysander], which he preferred to all the pieces of Racine."
The passage amply justifies the remark which the commentator adds: "Thus
prejudice corrupts the taste, as it perverts
the judgment, in all the concerns of life." Nevertheless,
that very prejudice of the amiable Jesuit may have served the pupil as
a provocative; and we can easily fancy this boy defending his favorite
dramatist against the attacks of the fathers, aiming at them the arguments
he had heard at home from his mentor, Abbé Châteauneuf.

In a large school there must
be, of course, the unpopular teacher, who is not always the least worthy
one. Father Lejay, professor of rhetoric of many years' standing, filled
this "rôle" in the Collège Louis-le-Grand. He was a strict,
zealous, disagreeable formalist; "a good Jesuit," devoted to his order,
who composed and compiled many large volumes, still to be seen in French
libraries; a dull, plodding, ambitious man, with an ingredient in his composition
of that quality which has given to the word Jesuit its peculiar
meaning in modern languages. He wrote a book of pious sentences for Every
Day of the Week, and a discourse upon the "Triumph of Religion under Louis
XIV." He translated and annotated the "Roman Antiquities" of Denys of Halicarnassus,
compiled a vast work upon rhetoric, wrote upon the "Duties of a Christian
with Regard to Faith and Conduct," wrote tragedies and comedies in Latin
and in French, which were played at the college by the boys, with the "success"
that invariably attends such performances. These dramas of the professor
of rhetoric, which are described by a French explorer as among the curiosities
of inanity, reveal the interesting fact that Father Lejay had a particular
antipathy to "philosophers," and knew very well how to flatter Louis XIV.
by abusing them. He was indeed much given to politic flattery, each of
his works being dedicated to some great man of the hour whom his order
or himself was interested to conciliate.

Plays were often performed at
this school. One of the first comedies presented after the entrance of
François Arouet was Lejay's "Damocles," in which the friend of Dionysius
is held up to scorn as a "philosopher," and the tyrant is presented to
the admiration of the auditors as an ancient Louis XIV. Damocles is remarkable
for the flowing amplitude of his beard, in which his foolish soul delights,
and his favorite saying is, "Nations will never be happy until kings become
philosophers, or philosophers kings." The king says, at length, "Very well,
be it so; reign in my place." Damocles reigns. He commits every imbecile
folly which the crude mind of Father Lejay could imagine or boys laugh
at. The people rise against the "philosopher," and recall Dionysius, who
tears the royal mantle from Damocles, and dooms him to lose his noble beard,
more precious to him than life. The crowning scene is the last, in which
a barber, with abundant ceremony and endless comic incident, cuts off the
beard, amid applause that shook the solid
walls of the college. It was only with Father Lejay that the young
Arouet was not in pleasant accord during the seven years of his school
life. The anecdote of their collision, vaguely related by Duvernet, came
doubtless from Voltaire himself, even to some of the words which Duvernet
employs in telling it: -

"Among the professors, who were
very much attached to him, Father Lejay, a man of mediocre ability, vain,
jealous, and held in little esteem by his colleagues, was the only one
whose good-will Voltaire could not win. He was professor of eloquence,
and, like most of those who plume themselves upon that gift, he was very
little eloquent. He was regarded as the Cotin
of orators. Voltaire had with him some literary discussions the master
felt himself humiliated by his pupil, and this was the source of that antipathy
which Father Lejay had for Voltaire, -- a feeling which he could not conquer,
nor even disguise. One day, the pupil, exasperated by the professor, gave
him a retort of a certain kind, which ought not to have been provoked,
and which it had been discreet in the instructor not to notice. Father
Lejay, in his rage, descends from his platform, runs to him, seizes him
by the collar, and, rudely shaking him, cries out several times, 'Wretch!
You will one day be the standard-bearer of deism in France!'"

Such a scene would not, in that
age, have injured
the audacious boy in the opinion of his comrades. It
might even have made him the hero of a day; for it was of this period that
Madame of Orleans wrote, when she entered in her diary, "Religious belief
is so completely extinct in this country that one seldom meets a young
man who does not wish to pass himself off as an atheist. But the oddest
part of it is that the very person who professes atheism in Paris plays
the saint at court."

CHAPTER VI. THE SCHOOL
POET.

ALL things pressed this boy toward
the path he was to follow. Every influence to which he was subjected, whether
within or without the college, stimulated the development of his peculiar
aptitudes.

In the France of Louis XIV. there
were five illustrious names that did not belong to men of rank in church
or state, and they were all the names of poets: Corneille, Racine, Molière,
Boileau, and J. B. Rousseau. These alone of the commoners of France could
be supposed worthy to be guests at great houses, and sit with princes in
the king's presence. These five: Corneille, a lawyer's son; Racine and
Boileau, sons of small placemen; Molière, the son of a Paris upholsterer;
J. B. Rousseau, the child of the Arouet family's shoemaker. The boy Rousseau
may have carried home shoes to the notary's house; but the proudest head
in France was proud to bow to Rousseau the poet. The diaries of that generation
attest the estimation in which the verse-making art was held, and the great
number of persons who tried their hands at it. Verse was the one road to
glory open to nameless youth, the career of arms being an exlusive preserve
of feudal rank.

We have seen that the professors
with whom this lad had most to do wrote plays in prose and in verse. The
performance of those works on the great days of the school year absorbed
such an amount of time and toil that we might suppose the college a training-school
of actors. There was the little drama and the grand drama: the first consisting
of farces and burlesques, in Latin or in French, or in both; the second
of tragedies, in Latin. The little drama was presented in one of the college
halls a few days before the end of the school year, and was witnessed only
by the inmates[;] the plays being short, the comic effects simple, and
the mounting inexpensive. The grand drama, reserved for the final day,
when the prizes were given, -- the solemn day of judgment of a French school,
-- was given in the great court of the college, converted for the occasion
into a vast tent. The play was usually in five acts, and "entire months"
were employed in drilling the young performers, rehearsing the play, and
preparing the scenes. The stage was set up at the further end of the court,
opposite the great gate-way, and the interior was all gay with banners,
flags, streamers, tapestry, emblems, devices, and mottoes. The families
of the pupils were invited, and places of honor were reserved for the chiefs
of the Jesuit order, for bishops and archbishops, and for members of the
royal family; the king himself being sometimes present. The five-act Latin
play, on some subject of classic antiquity, was the prelude to the great
event of the occasion, the distribution of the prizes; and as the performers
were generally the boys who were to receive prizes, it was a day of intoxicating
glory to them, the applause bestowed upon the actor being renewed and emphasized
when he stood up to receive the public recognition of a year's good conduct.
On some occasions there was a mock trial, and the reading of poems composed
by the pupils. The acting of charades was also a part of the school festivities,
and they were performed very much as we do them now at holiday
times, although with more formality.

If these provocatives to literature
were not sufficient, there were Literary Societies in the institution,
not unlike those of American colleges at the present time. These were styled
in the Jesuit schools of that period "Academies;" and, as the Jesuits invented
them, no reader needs to be told that the sessions were presided over by
one of the father professors. In other respects, there was no material
difference between the Academy for which François Arouet composed
and declaimed and any Gamma-Delta society of an American college of the
present time. The members debated, read poems of their own composition,
declaimed those of others, and did all those acts and things which readers
remember as part of their own joyous school experience. The tradition of
the college is that the violent scene with Father Lejay, just related,
occurred not in class, as Duvernet has it, but during a debate in the Academy,
Lejay presiding.

Thus stimulated to productivity
young Arouet soon became, and to the end of his course remained, the prodigy
of the Collège Louis-le-Grand. Some of his early spurts of verse
have been preserved. Father Porée, being surprised one day by the
end of the hour, and having no time to dictate a theme, hastily said, as
the bell summoned the class away, "Make Nero speak at the moment when he
is about to kill himself." The boy handed in these lines: --

On another occasion, in the same
class, he amused himself by throwing up and catching a snuff-box. Father
Porée took it from him, and required him to redeem it by composing
some verses. He produced the following: --

Other light verses, composed
in his earlier school years, have been preserved; but these will suffice
to show that, while still a child, he had a degree of the literary tact
of which he was afterwards a master. As if to make amends to Father Lejay,
he translated into French verse a Latin poem of that professor, of a hundred
lines or more, upon Sainte Geneviève, always a very popular saint
in Paris, even to this day. The poem is of the purest orthodoxy. A more
popular effort among his comrades was a translation into four French lines
of an old Latin stanza upon bell-ringers, in which the poet gives utterance
to a desire, common to students, that the rope held in the hand of the
ringer might be twisted around his neck.

It is not possible to fix the
date of these poems, but we are sure of one thing: before he was eleven
years of age, and before he had been at school a year, he was recognized
and shown as a wonder of precocious talent. We are sure of this, because
it was in the character of a wondrous boy-poet that Abbé Châteauneuf
presented him to a personage still more wondrous, Mademoiselle Ninon de
Lenclos, then in her ninetieth year, but still the centre of a brilliant
circle. She died in October, 1705, when François Arouet was not
quite eleven years of age. Ladies of the highest rank, we are assured,
paid court to this anomalous being, and besought her, even in extreme old
age, to "form" their sons by permitting them to frequent her evening parties.
An uncomely young dandy having boasted that he had been "formed" by her,
she said, "I am like God, who repented that he had made man." Molière
consulted her upon his comedies, and caught from her conversation some
traits of his masterpiece, Tartuffe. She lived in elegance and luxury all
her days, courted by the courted, admired by the admired, envied by the
envied, sung by poets, loved by priests, reprobated, so far as we can perceive,
by no one.

And who was Ninon de Lenclos?
She was a country beauty, the child of gentle parents: her mother a good
Catholic; her father a "philosopher" of the sect of Epicurus, who taught
her early that there ought not to be one moral law for the male of our
species, and another for the female. She believed him, and inferred that
there was no moral law for either. At seventeen she became the mistress
of the Cardinal de Richelieu, who gave her a pension for life of two thousand
francs a year, a competence at that period, upon which she set up in the
vocation of Épicurienne. Ninon was "an honest man," says a French
writer, "because she only had one lover at a time." But she changed them
so suddenly that she was unable herself to decide a claim to the paternity
of one of her children, and the two contestants decided the matter by a
cast of the dice. The boy who thus won a father rose to high rank in the
French navy, and died in battle.

An anecdote more astounding is
related of her by Voltaire, who doubtless heard it from the Abbé
de Châteauneuf. Near the gate St. Antoine there was a restaurant,
much frequented by "honest people," like Mademoiselle de Lenclos and her
abbé. One evening, after supper there, a young man of nineteen,
who had been one of the party, met her in the garden, and made such importunate
love to her that she was obliged to tell him that she was his mother. The
young man, who had come to the place on horseback, took a pistol from his
holsters and shot himself dead in the garden. This tragic event made her
"a little more serious," but it did not change her way of life, nor lower
her in the regard of her friends.

She was a strict observer of
the proprieties of life, took such care of her fortune as to quadruple
the income her first lover assigned her, and gradually drew around her
the most agreeable and distinguished people in the kingdom, -- ladies as
well as men. For seventy years she held her ground: admired at first for
her beauty, grace, and hereditary musical gifts; admired later for her
"prudence," her "judgment," her good nature, her social talents, and her
sure taste in literature. She is said to have held in contempt and abhorrence
certain foibles occasionally noticed in other women, such as falsehood,
jealousy, malice, and ill-temper. Friendship she deemed a precious and
sacred thing; but as to love, she looked upon it, says Voltaire, as a mere
pastime, imposing no moral obligations; and it was her boast that her lovers
remained her friends and the friends of one another. The father of the
young man who shot himself abandoned Madame de Maintenon (afterwards the
king's wife) to pay court to Ninon, and yet madame remained her friend,
and pressed her to come and live in the palace, and help amuse her unamusable
old king. She used to say that she had never offered but one prayer,

All this being scarcely conceivable
by us, it were of no avail to enlarge upon it. To feel the full force of
the contrast between the social laws of two contemporary communities, both
called Christian, we have only to reflect that this was the period assigned
by Hawthorne to the incidents of the "Scarlet Letter."

She was "as dry as a mummy" when
the little poet was taken to see her, -- "a wrinkled, decrepit creature,
who had nothing upon her bones but a yellow skin that was turning black."
He gives this account of their meeting:

"I had written some verses, which
were of no value, but seemed very good for my age. Mademoiselle de Lenclos
had formerly known my mother, who was much attached to the Abbé
de Châteauneuf; and thus it was found a pleasant thing to take me
to see her. The abbé was master of her house; it was he who had
finished the amorous history of that singular person. He was one of those
men who do not require the attraction of youth in women; and the charms
of her society had upon him the effect of beauty. She made him languish
two or three days; and the abbé having asked her why she had held
out so long, she replied that she had wished to wait until her birthday
for so beautiful a gala; and on that day she was just seventy. She did
not carry the jest very far, and the Abbé de Châteauneuf remained
her intimate friend. For my part, I was presented to her a little later;
she was then eighty-five [eighty-nine]. It pleased her to put me in her
will; she left me two thousand francs to buy books with. Her death occurred
soon after my visit."

This legacy, which, as Voltaire
more than once records, was punctually paid, confirms the version of the
Abbé Duvernet, who says that the aged Ninon was delighted with the
boy. Her house, in the Rue des Tournelles, was, he assures us, "a school
of good breeding, and the rendezvous of philosophers and wits, whom she
knew how to please and interest even in her decrepitude." All pleased her
in the lad, -- his confidence, his repartees, and, above all, his information.
She questioned him upon the topic of the day, -- the deadly feud between
the sincere, austere Jansenists and the politic, scholarly Jesuits, then
approaching its climax in the destruction of Port Royal. Doubtless he had
his little say upon that subject, and spoke in the "decided tone" which
the abbé mentions. Ninon, he remarks, "saw in him the germ of a
great man; and it was to warm that germ into life that she left him the
legacy to buy books, -- a gift at once the most flattering and the most
useful to a young man whose sole passion was to instruct himself."

The legacy was indeed most flattering.
What a stimulus to a susceptible boy of eleven, already conscious of his
powers, and living in the midst of a society who assumed that the composition
of good French verse was among the most glorious of all possible feats
of the mind! The next year, being in the fifth class, he began a tragedy
upon the story, told in Livy, of Amulius, king of Alba, the wicked uncle
of those babes in the woods, Romulus and Remus. He called his play "Amulius
and Numitor." He kept it many years among his papers, but threw it at length
into the fire.

While still in the fifth class
his fame reached the court. An invalid soldier, who had served under the
immediate command of the king's only son and heir, came to the college
one day, and asked the regent to write for him a petition in verse to the
prince for aid in his sickness and poverty. The regent referred him to
Arouet, who wrote twenty lines for him in half an hour. He made the old
soldier address the prince as "the worthy son of the greatest of kings,"
his love, the people's hopes, who, without reigning over France, reigned
over the hearts of the French." "Will you permit me," ran the petition,
"to present a new year's gift to you, who only receive them from the hand
of the gods? At your birth, they say, Mars gave you valor, Minerva wisdom,
Apollo beauty; but a god more powerful, whom in my anguish I implore, designed
to bestow new year gifts upon me in giving you liberality." The petition
brought a few golden louis to the soldier, and made some little noise at
Versailles and Paris. It is said also to have renewed the alarm of his
father, lest so much flattery bestowed upon a casual exertion of his son's
talents should lure him from the path which leads to rich clients and liberal
fees. This versified petition was the best of his school poems that has
been preserved, and was really turned with much elegance and ingenuity.
For a boy of twelve to devise a compliment for Louis XIV. or his race,
after half a century of incense, that should attract a moment's attention
from king or court must certainly be accounted a kind of triumph.

He did not neglect the ordinary
studies of the school. At the close of his sixth year, in August, 1710,
on the day of the distribution of prizes, he enjoyed extraordinary honors.
Prize after prize, crown after crown (if we may believe tradition), was
awarded him, until he was covered with crowns and staggered under the weight
of his prize books. Among the guests in the grand pavilion was the poet
J. B. Rousseau, then in the prime of manhood, the lustre of his fame undimmed.
The name of François-Marie Arouet caught his ear, and he asked one
of the fathers if the lad was the son of Maître Arouet, of the Chamber
of Accounts, whom he knew. The professor said he was, and that he had shown
for some years a marvelous talent for poetry. Then the professor took the
boy by the hand, all covered with crowns and laden with glory, and presented
him to the poet. Rousseau kissed him on both cheeks, as the French do at
such times, congratulated him warmly upon the honors he had received, and
foretold for him a brilliant future. The scholar, with equal enthusiasm,
threw his arms around the poet's neck, amid the emotion and applause of
the assembly.

And so he went on, triumphantly
and happily, to the end of his seven years' course; a good scholar, a favorite
of his teachers, admired by all his companions, and by some of them beloved.
His friends at school remained his friends as long as they lived, and some
of them lived to witness and to solace his last days. The warmest, tenderest,
and longest friendships of his life were formed at the Collège Louis-le-Grand,
and his instructors followed his career with interest and pride, despite
the human foibles and the French faults that marred it. There is no question
that his life at school was happy and honorable, and both in a high degree.
He made the most of his chances there, such as they were.

These seven years, so brilliant
and so fortunate for him in the safe seclusion of a school, were the darkest
France had known since the time of Jeanne Darc [D'Arc]; for it was then
that the French people had to pay large installments of the penalty of
enduring for half a century an ignorant and incompetent king. The defeat
of Blenheim, in Arouet's first year at school, was followed by that of
Ramilies in 1706, while he was writing his tragedy upon the bad uncle of
Romulus and Remus. Defeat followed defeat, until in 1709 occurred the crowning
disaster of Malplaquet. There were times, as this boy remembered, when
Paris itself dreaded the victor's approach; and he never forgot the famine
of 1709, when, besides the catastrophe of Malplaquet, the olives failed,
the fruit trees were nipped by frost, the harvest was ruined, the British
fleet captured the grain ships coming from the East, and the cold of the
winter was extreme. His father had to pay a hundred francs extra for him
at the college that year, and yet he had to eat brown bread. Probably he
meant oaten bread, which Madame de Maintenon set the example of eating
at Versailles. The king sent to the mint that year four hundred thousand
francs' worth of gold plate, and there was a general melting of silver
plate from great houses.

The old king had his share of
sorrow and humiliation. It was in April, 1711, young Arouet's last year
at school, that the series of deaths began in the royal family, the mere
recollection of which, many years after, brought tears to susceptible French
eyes. The king's only son, the dauphin, died of small-pox in that month.
The next February his son, the new dauphin, died; and, three weeks after,
his son, leaving to France only a boy of two years, "within two fingers
of death," who became Louis XV. Paris saw father, mother, and son all borne
to the tomb in the same hearse. The hardest hearts, the wisest heads, forgave
the stricken king for the woes unnumbered he had brought upon his country
through his subservience to priests. Our young student, when he came, half
a century later, to treat of these events, in his "Age of Louis XIV.,"
wrote, "This time of desolation left in the hearts of men an impression
so profound that, during the minority of Louis
XV., I knew several persons who could not speak of these losses
without tears."

He remembered, also, that at
the period when Marlborough seemed about to come thundering at the gates
of Paris, the minds of men were distracted by what seem to us trifling
religious disputes. But at that time nothing was trifling that savored
of religion, for behind it all there was the dungeon, the torture-chamber,
the bayonet, the axe, the wheel, the fagot[.] He remembered that, about
the time when he was crowned and applauded in the presence of Rousseau,
a Jewess and her daugbter were burned at Lisbon for some trivial act of
eating lamb at the season when priests said meat must not be eaten. The
story circulated in the school that the girl was ravishingly beautiful,
but he declares that it was not her beauty that drew the tears from his
eyes when he heard the tale.

And at that very time, perhaps
at the moment when the young poet heard his name called in the splendid
pavilion, the light of victory may have gleamed in the eyes of every Jesuit
in Paris on account of the destruction of the convent of Port Royal, near
Versailles. The fundamental article of religion with Louis XIV. was the
royal authority, and hence he regarded heresy as rebellion. Long he hesitated
before proceeding to extremities with the Jansenist ladies of Port Royal
in the Fields, so renowned were they for piety and good works, so revered
by the solid men of Paris. But his confessor, Tellier, gave him no peace,
and the bewildered old king sent a confidential servant of his household
to the convent to see what manner of persons its inmates were. "By my faith,
sire," said the man on his return, "I saw there nothing but saints, male
and female." The king sighed, and said nothing. The confessor, divining
his thought, assured him that there was nothing in the world so dangerous
as the virtues with which the poison of heresy was frequently covered.
The fatal order was given. The ladies were distributed among the convents
of the kingdom, and their abode was utterly destroyed,
so that not one stone remained upon another.

Young Arouet could not escape
a knowledge of these events, so dear to every Jesuit. In the very street
in which his college was situated there was the Abbey of Port Royal of
Paris, a kindred establishment to the one near Versailles. He lived close
to these events, and was old enough to feel the infinite frivolity of the
dispute which a priest could use as a pretext for such atrocities. During
his last year at school, 1711, he may have seen men digging up the bones
of the eminent persons buried near the destroyed convent, and conveying
them to a village church-yard near by; and, during his whole school life,
the soldiers of the king were hunting Protestants in the mountains of Cévennes
for magistrates to break upon the wheel, to hang upon gibbets, to put to
the torture, and burn at the stake.

One of the Latin plays of Father Porée
was performed at Boston, Mass., at the Commencement of Boston College,
June 27, 1877. It was called Philedonus, or the Romance of a Poor Young
Man, the argument of which was given thus: While pursuing his studies in
Paris, Philedonus neglects his religious duties, and yields to the fascinations
of the luxurious capital. Learning that his friend, Erastus, is dangerously
ill, Philedonus becomes the victim of melancholy, and no longer listens
to the voice of the tempter. Through the salutary influence of a heavenly
vision, in which his mother and a guardian angel appear, and partially
arouse the long-dormant energies of his better nature, the student resolves
to commend. Various circumstances -- among others the dying curse of Erastus
-- strengthen the good resclutions of Philedonus, who at length escapes
from then toils of parasites plotting to effect his ruin, reforms his companions,
and returns to his home in Italy.[ Back ]

Of the death of a mother
the execrable accomplice, if I die by my own hand, I have deserved it well;
and, having until now done only acts of cruelty, I have wished, in killing
myself, to do one of justice.[ Back ]

UPON A CONFISCATED SNUFF-BOX. Adieu, my poor snuff-box; adieu,
I shall never see thee more; nor pains, nor tears, nor prayer will give
thee back to me; my efforts are lost. Adieu, my poor snuff-box; adieu,
sweet fruit of my crowns. If money was the price of thy redemption, I would
rather go and empty the treasury of Plutus. But it is not that god whom
I am required to implore. To get a sight of thee again, I must, alas! address
a prayer to Phœbus. What an obstacle is interposed between us! To ask verses
of me! Alas! I can produce no more of them. Adieu, my poor snuff-box; I
shall never see thee more.[ Back ]